When comparing GameMaker: Studio vs Cocos2d-x and Cocos2d Family, the Slant community recommends Cocos2d-x and Cocos2d Family for most people. In the question“What are the best 2D game engines?”Cocos2d-x and Cocos2d Family is ranked 7th while GameMaker: Studio is ranked 9th. The most important reason people chose Cocos2d-x and Cocos2d Family is:

25% of iPhone games are made using Cocos2d-x (A Cocos2d mobile variant.)
This means you will not be alone in development, and will have access to a large community. You'll know you are developing for an engine that works.

Pros

Pro

Extremely easy to learn

GameMaker: Studio is incredibly easy to learn. It requires almost no programming knowledge which means that those without the technical experience, such as designers or artists, can create their projects without the help of a programmer.

Pro

Gives developers access to a more fine-grained controle over the logic through the Game Maker Language

Game Maker Language (GML) is the primary scripting language that is interpreted similarly to Java's Just-In-Time compilation used in GameMaker. It is used to further enhance and control the design of a game through more conventional programming, as opposed to the drag and drop system.

Pro

Easy to find resources/tutorials/assistance

GameMaker: Studio has a huge following, tons of people put up tutorial videos, and it's just generally easy to find help. It has a huge community.

Pro

Assets can easily be found in the official marketplace

Yoyogames website has a marketplace which opens up an opportunity for people to sell or giveaway created assets and resources (sprites, scripts, sounds, extensions, full source codes, etc.) for use in GameMaker. This benefits people who needs quality assets for their games, and for creative people to provide these assets for extra income. The Marketplace has a rating system so it can eventually increase the quality and competitiveness of the assets submitted.

Pro

It has an IDE used for loading all of the assets

It is very easy to manage all the resources you want to put in your game, the UI widgets for each assets (sprites, sounds, backgrounds, rooms, objects and shaders) are intuitive enough for when adding or even editing the properties of each your assets. The included editors are also good and easy to use (sprite/image editors, shader editor and room editor).

Pro

Easy to use

Pro

Extremely stable

GameMaker: Studio has been around since 1999 and has been used and maintained during all this time. This makes it an extremely stable game engine.

Pro

Cross-platform multiplayer support

There is the possibility of creating games that interact with different platforms and is not that hard.

Pro

Easy cross-platform shader support

Write your own shaders in one shader language and have it automatically ported to all platforms. You can even choose a specific shader language to wield the full power of the target device.

Pro

Built-in support for pixel-perfect collisions

Enabling pixel-perfect collisions on 2D sprites is so easy many will likely turn it on when maybe they might be better off without it. Regardless, it simplifies small and/or retro console-like game work. This is a feature fairly unique in this class of game engines.

Pro

Supports 3D

There is also 3D support that doesn't interfere with the primary 2D focus.

Pro

A proven engine for mobile development

25% of iPhone games are made using Cocos2d-x (A Cocos2d mobile variant.)

This means you will not be alone in development, and will have access to a large community. You'll know you are developing for an engine that works.

Pro

Supports 3D models with skeleton animation

A new feature since Cocos2d-x v3.1 is support for 3D models (in your 2D game), not only this but support for skeleton animations is included too! This awesome feature allows for impressive characters in your game along with easier, more fluid and realistic animations.

Pro

Great script language support

It supports Lua and Javascript with full feature support.Especially with Cocos2d-JS you can develop games cross web and native, and the native solution have great performance with JS Bindings, much better than hybrid solution.

Pro

Allows for easy debugging

It has a built-in Python interpreter that allows for easy debugging.

Pro

Greater performance than high level APIs

Cocos2d-x is C++ based engine and it has CPU advantages for most platforms because of that. It uses polygonal mesh methods for sprite rendering for using GPU advantages. (You also use quad methods for benefit CPU).

Pro

Future-proof

Cocos2d-x is not only open source but also supported by Chukong Technologies of China and USA.

Regularly updated and adding support for the latest technologies. 2014 has already seen the release of Version 3, a new Cocos Studio development toolkit (optional) and support for new technologies like skeleton animation systems Spine and Adobe DragonBone.

Pro

Good documentation

Documentation includes a programming guide, API reference, video tutorials and massive reference test code project showing all functions and giving working code to the user.

Pro

Great video tutorials

Pro

OpenGL hardware acceleration

Pro

Easy integration of 3rd party plugins

Through the use of SDKBox you can easily integrate 3rd party SDKs and plugins for each version of Cocos2D (Lua, C++ or JavaScript), you just choose the SDKs to integrate and SDKBox will do the rest.

For example, if you want to add a rating plugin, you use sdkbox::PluginReview::init(); and if you want to add the Vundle Ad Network SDK, you use the one packaged in SDKBox SDKBOX sdkbox::PluginVungle::init();.

Pro

Highly active community for questions and support

Pro

No external dependencies

Ad

Cons

Con

Exporting to some formats costs extra

You need to buy extra modules to be able to export to platforms like Android, iOS, HTML5 and others.

Con

No built-in refactoring tools

There are no built-in refactoring tools. For example, you can rename a resource, but GM:S will not automatically change the mentions of it across the code to the new name. Furthermore, because all file formats are text-based, basic refactoring could be achieved by simply doing "find & replace in all files" -- which is a feature offered by pretty much every external code editor nowadays -- but no such feature here. Hitting Ctrl-F will pull up a rather odd Find/Replace box but selecting a word before hitting Ctrl-F will not autofill the Find field for you like it will in most tools. Even that you have to cut and paste yourself.

Con

The scripting language used is quite limited

Language does not support actual objects, structs, real data types, functions, overloading, even argument naming. Developers generally have to code around the lack of these features in very tricky ways.

Con

Development has been and will be cosmetic

The change from 1.x to 2.x was cosmetic, the engine and language stayed the same. The roadmap for future development is also cosmetic and includes updating the sprite editor, adding an audio editor, and adding a "mini map" for the IDE.

Con

Destructive DRM

In late 2012/early 2013, YoYo Games released a version of their new Studio IDE for cross-platform development that would import games and destroy all of the image type resources for some legitimate purchasers of the software by superimposing a pirate symbol on top of the image. This was due to a fault in their digital rights management software implementation which they use as a method of combating pirated copies of the software. Though the false positives bug is reported to be fixed, the DRM is still in place and may affect placeholder graphics, etc. YoYoGames publicly stated they would remove the DRM at a later point in time, but that other less-invasive DRM techniques would remain.

Con

Bad history of ignoring critical bugs

In the past, the developer failed to update the software for iOS and Android when game-breaking updates were made to those platforms.

Con

Expensive for what it offers

There are several options with more flexibility, better learning resources, and a lower price point.

Con

Can't embed videos in game

Doesn't support embedding videos in a game.

Con

Poor level editor

No marquee select, no layers, can be glitchy, no grouping, etc.

Con

The cost to buy for development is outrageous

The cost for this tool is hindering for indie developers who have little money to work with.

Con

Tends to crash or not compile games properly

Con

No GUI editor

The GUI must be hard-coded, leaving a lot of tricky calculations and jumping through hoops to accommodate different devices and displays; it's probably the least developed and hardest thing about GMS2 compared to comparable engines

Con

Proprietary language forces expensive "lock in"

Because it uses GML, a very non-standard custom language, new users do not learn a transferrable language and become locked in.

Con

Poor accessibility and integration

Documentation and resources largely focus on proprietary scripting language, which is necessary for achieving full potential of the software due to poor drag and drop integration.

Con

Code editor not friendly to indented code

While the editor of course has features for intending code such as auto indent and smart tabs that can be turned on or off, these features work in unusual ways and, overall, the editor is not very adaptable to various typing styles. Also, Home always takes you to position 0 and never to the beginning of the text no matter how many times you hit it. Thus, if you hit Home and then Enter a new line, with auto indent on, it will always mess up the indentation on the line following the new line leaving you to fudge around to fix it manually. If you prefer tabs over spaces, forget it. Finally, if you leave the GameMaker app and try to click back into the code editor, the code editor will not fully get the focus sometimes leaving you with the ability to type but not tab. It usually takes two clicks to fully focus the code editor from outside the GM app.

Con

No way to activate or use existing modules

Support entirely focused on new iteration depriving even basic functionality of this version with any purchase that hasn't already been activated. It is still possible, thought not intuitive, to download this version on the trail screen for GM S 2. But no purchased (wildly expensive) module can be added any longer.

Con

This is very flat for games

They are not beautiful - for example, Undertale.

Con

Owned by a gambling company, Playtech

As opposed to other engines, which are open source or owned by game companies, GameMaker is developed by YoYoGames, which is owned by Playtech, a gambling software company.

Con

Poor documentation

Most existing documentation is out of date. API documentation sometimes exists, though is usually just a one-liner and more often than not is completely absent. New features and significant system rewrites often make it to a major release without a single line of documentation accompanying them. Cocos2d-x family is developed by Chinese mostly, so market outside of China is not their main priority. Some tools (like Cocos Studio) have China-specific services and markets.

Con

Poor support and non-existent community

Up until 2013, this was one of the best engines around. However, since then it was bought by a Chinese company and began stagnating - it's virtually in a slow death. Most developers abandoned Cocos in favor of more modern solutions leaving the community weak and the forums with little or no traffic. Although the Cocos2d-x Forum seems to have a decent community going.

Con

Cocos2d-html5 is way behind Cocos2d-x

While Cocos2d-html5 tries to mimic it's Cocos2d-x sister and has the same people working on it, it has lots of restrictions compared to Cocos2d-x: no Spine mesh support, no 3D models, bad text label quality, etc.

Con

Fragmentation; hard to find useful tutorials

Cocos2d family includes different projects: cocos2d-x, cocos2d-html5, cocos2d-objc, cocos2d-XNA. Most tutorials describe techniques specific to single project of the family, and cannot be applied to other projects.

Con

Can seem very complex for a novice developer

There isn't much documentation or tutorials.

Con

Modest functionality

Almost all free alternatives are more convenient, faster, and more functional.

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